Arlo VMB5000 offline, starting to think it's the Audio Doorbell at fault

[cryocide]

tldr: It's almost certainly the audio doorbell in my case. The doorbell is 18 months old with no sign of water intrusion.

After doing some testing, including factory resetting the system and re-adding and reconfiguring everything, I think I might have found the culprit that's taking down my whole system.

System setup: 3 cameras and 1 audio doorbell. The farthest camera is 20 feet away from the smart hub. Smart hub is in the DMZ on the router for troubleshooting purposes, per support article.

When the problem occurs, the Smart Hub becomes completely unresponsive, even to the Sync button. The only thing that brings it back online is power cycling it. It reacquires the 3 cameras on its own, and the audio doorbell starts working again after a few button presses. However, the doorbell has a tendency to let out an ear-piercing screech instead of the normal acknowledgement chime at the doorbell itself. The sound isn't feedback, it's PCM static, as if the audio codec is out of sync during playback. When the Smart Hub is offline, the cameras heat up due to heavy battery drain while they try to get their unresponsive boss to answer them. Batteries don't last more than a few days during an outage.

The system ran successfully without any hiccups for 3 weeks after I took the batteries out of the doorbell. When I put batteries in the doorbell, the system froze up within 3 days. Prior to this, the system rarely made it more than 4 days, and never longer than a week without requiring a reboot.

I have a support ticket open, # 41969229 since September 30 and haven't received any response from the support team. I've kept the ticket updated in their absence, because *someone* has to be a good technician and I guess I have to come out of retirement to do that for them. Hopefully this helps them find and squash this bug.

[JessicaP]

Hi cryocide,

In regards to your case, let me reach out to you via private message to gather more information from you.

[cryocide]

Thank you! Lea from the support team updated the ticket and requested more info and contact details. I also replied to your PM. I'll keep this thread updated with what I find out if there's any sort of resolution. I know I'm not the only one whose system freezes up from time to time.

[JJAdV]

I gave up on the door bell in the end, returned it and got a Ring, its been flawless. the Arlo audio doorbell was far too laggy, crashed the phone app all the time, and generally never worked. 

It seems an issue they cant resolve, the delay and laggyness of everything.. My Rin doorbell and cameras are super fast. Just a pity Ring isnt yet much into 4K.

[cryocide · Accepted solution]

Yeah, after much testing and whatnot, we determined that while the awful doorbell screech was caused by me having the switch set to the wrong position, it's still causing the whole Smart Hub to freeze up. It's something with the motion detection and the Audio Doorbell for sure. I'm out of warranty and therefore out of the free 1-year service window, so at this point I have to either choose a doorbell that works with Alexa or IFTTT and kludge the whole thing together, or just switch systems like you did. I already have a camera on the front door and don't really need a video doorbell, but maybe I can repurpose that one for better coverage elsewhere. At this point though, it's really likely that I'll do like you did and go with Ring for the doorbell and decide later if I want to switch over the whole system.  I'm definitely not a fan of having yet another wifi network, hidden or otherwise, clogging up the airwaves and competing for clean signal.